mercy or in the agonies of death, were heard at a great distance. But few prisoners were made; and the division occupied, with much regularity, the different points allotted to each regiment. Meanwhile the ravelin of San Roque was carried by the gorge, by a detachment drawn from the trenches, under the command of Major Wilson of the 48th; and the engineers were directed to blow up the dam and sluice that caused the inundation of the Rivillas, by which means the passage of that river between La Picurina and the breaches could be more easily effected. One entire regiment of Germans, called the regiment of Hesse Darmstadt, that defended the ravelin were put to death. While all this was taking place at the castle and San Roque, a fearful scene was acting at the breaches. The Light and 4th Divisions, ten thousand strong, advanced to the glacis undiscovered—a general silence pervading the whole, as the spirits of the men settled into that deep sobriety which denotes much determination of purpose; but at this spot their footsteps were heard, and, “perhaps since the invention of gunpowder,”[24] its effects were never more powerfully brought into action. In a moment the different materials which the enemy had arranged in the neighbourhood of the breaches were lighted up—darkness was converted into light—torches blazed along the battlements—and a spectator, at a short distance from the walls, could distinguish the features of the contending parties. A battery of mortars, doubly loaded with grenades, and a blaze of musketry, unlike anything hitherto witnessed by the oldest soldier, opened a murderous fire against the two divisions; but, unshaken by its effects, they pressed onward and jumped into the ditch. The 4th Division, destined to carry the breach to the right, met with a frightful catastrophe at the onset. The leading platoons, consisting of the fusilier brigade,[25] sprang into that part of the ditch that had been filled by the inundation of the Rivillas, and were seen no more; but the bubbles that rose on the surface of the water were a terrible assurance of the struggles which those devoted soldiers—the men of Albuera—ineffectually made to extricate themselves from the deadly grasp of each other, and from so unworthy an end. ----- Footnote 24: Colonel Jones’s Sieges, i. p. 236. Footnote 25: 7th, 23rd, and 1st 48th. -----